"Mm . . . lithium," said Nick.
"Oh yes . . . ?" said Dot, looking uneasily from one to the other.
"She's just a much happier young pussycat. I think we've turned the corner."
Nick said, "She's doing some great work now, at St Martin's."
"Yes, she's doing marvellous collages and things," said Gerald.
"Ah, modern art, no doubt," said Don, with a dreary ironic look at Nick.
"Don't pretend to be a philistine, Dad," said Nick, and saw him unable to separate the praise from the reproach; the French pronunciation of philistine didn't help.
"It seems to work for her, anyway," said Gerald, who liked the therapeutic excuse for Catherine's large abstract efforts. "And she's got a super boyfriend, that we're all very happy about. Because we haven't always had good luck on that front."
"Oh . . . " said Dot, and looked down at her drink as if to say that neither, indeed, had they.
"Mm, we're jolly proud of her, in fact," said Gerald grandly, so that he seemed slightly ashamed. "And we're all going to be together in France this year, which Rachel and I are delighted about. First time for some years. And Nick too, as you know, will be joining us . . . at least for a bit . . . long overdue . . ." and Gerald guzzled the rest of his gin-and-tonic.
"Oh," said Dot, "you didn't say, dear."
"Oh, yes," said Nick. "Well, I'm going with Wani Ouradi, you know, who I'm working with on this magazine—we're going to Italy and Germany to look at things for that, and then we hope to drop in at . . . the manoir, for a few days on the way back."
"That'll be a wonderful experience for you, old boy," Don said. And Nick thought, really the poor old things, they do as well as they can; but for a minute he almost blamed them for not knowing he was going to Europe with Wani, and for making him tell them a plan so heavy with hidden meaning. It wasn't their fault that they didn't know—Nick couldn't tell them things, and so everything he said and did took on the nature of a surprise, big or little but somehow never wholly benign, since they were aftershocks of the original surprise, that he was, as his mother said, a whatsit.
"Because you normally have Nick to look after the house for you, don't you," she said. "When you're away." She clung to this fact, as a proof of his trustworthiness to important others, who apparently didn't care about his being a whatsit one way or the other.
"Poor old Nick, he has got rather landed with that in the past. This year we'll have our housekeeper and her daughter move in, and they can do a massive clean-up of the house without us getting under their feet. It makes a bit of a holiday for them." Gerald gestured liberally with his empty glass.
"That sounds like the sort of holiday I'm used to!" said Dot, who longed for the spoiling of a hotel, but was subjected to her sister-in-law's cottage at Holkham each September.
Don brought Gerald a refill, and had a tiny one himself; they tended not to go at quite that pace. He said, "He's a good chap, is he, this Ouradi?"
"You haven't met him . . . no . . . Oh, he's a charmer, absolutely. My son Tobias and he were great friends at Oxford—well, you all were, weren't you, Nick."
"I didn't get to know him well until a bit later," Nick said carefully, remembering the bathroom of the Flintshires' Mayfair house, the way the coke numbed their lips as they kissed. It gave him a tingle now, the thought of the other world that was waiting for him.
"Someone in his position can't help but do well," said Don.
"I have the feeling . . . " said Gerald, with a condescending twinkle. "I know high hopes are riding on him. The father's quite a character, of course."
"He's the supermarket chappie, isn't he."
"Bertrand? Oh, a. great man!" said Gerald, who used the word very freely, as if hoping it might stick as easily to himself. "I mean, an outstanding businessman, obviously . . . Awfully sad, I didn't know till the other day, but you know, they lost their first son."
"Oh, really . . ."
"Yup, he was knocked down by a lorry in the street, in Beirut of course. The child and his nanny or whatever they call them were both killed. Bertrand Ouradi was telling me about it only the other day."
Nick had to pretend he already knew7 this, and nodded sombrely to confirm it to his parents, who murmured in sympathy but seemed not to care much, as if a death in Beirut were only to be expected. "Yes, it was an awful thing," Nick said. It was a total surprise. His first thought was that his smug reckonings of intimacy with Wani looked very foolish. It was the family mystery, hardly glimpsed, far stronger and darker than their little sexual conspiracy. And Wani was carrying that burden . . . He seemed instantly more touching, more glamorous and more forgivable.
"His fiancee looks a sweet little thing," said Dot. "I've seen her at the hairdresser's."
"Really . . ."
"In the Tatler, I mean!"
"Ah, yes . . ."
"Of course Nick was in the Tatler, after that marvellous party of yours. We dined out on that for months." This was one of his mother's favourite boasts, and strictly a figure of speech, since they only dined out about three times a year. "Who's the other one we see? That great big fat one, that Nick knows?—Lord Shepton: he's always in."
"What about this little runaround of Nick's?" said Don, with anxious enthusiasm.
"Mm, she's a lively little thing," said Gerald.
"Did you say he'd given the car to you, dear, I didn't quite understand . . ."
"I told you, Mum," Nick said, "it's like a company car. I can drive it while I'm working for him."
"He must think very highly of you," Dot said doubtfully. "Well, it's all another world, isn't it?" No one quite assented to this, and after a moment she went on, "And how's your son?"
"Oh, he's in great shape. Set up his own little company now, we'll see how he gets on."
"We used to see his name in the paper a lot!" said Don, as if Toby's back-half paragraphs on share prospects had been the highlight of their days.
"Mm, I think that was a bit of a wrong turning. He's an outdoor sort of chap, you know, far too confined by office life . . . Well, it only lasted five minutes; and good on him for giving it a go."
"Oh, absolutely . . ."
"It was a bit more than that," said Nick.
"Mm? Nick's probably right," said Gerald. "What was it, six months on the Guardian, where I don't think he felt at all at home, and then a year or so on the Telegraph, on the City desk . . . yah."
"Some of Nick's university friends seem to have made their fortunes already," said Dot. "Who was it, dear, you said had bought a castle or something?"
"Oh . . . " said Nick, regretting having bragged about this. "Yes, one of them has. It's quite a small castle . . . ! But he's in reinsurance, you know."
"Ah," said Dot. Nick hoped she wouldn't ask him what reinsurance was. "They go so fast these days, don't they!" she said, as if Gerald might be equally breathless at the thought.
"Lord Exmouth's son's doing jolly well," said Don.
"Ah yes," said Gerald. "One of our local blue-bloods!" He had suddenly become a Barwick man at the mention of the indigenous aristocracy.
"That's right," said Don. "Well, I look after the clocks at Monksbury, so I've seen young Lord David on and off since he was a little boy."
"Really . . . ?" Gerald gave him a narrow look over the rim of his glass. "You don't go to the Noseleys, I suppose?"
"Not since the old lady died," said Don. "I did a lot of work out there, ooh, ten years ago now I suppose. Of course they had death-watch beetle at Noseley Abbey. They had a devil of a job getting rid of the little tinkers!"
Nick got up to pass round a dish of stuffed olives and made small waiterly noises to distract his father from saying what he knew was coming next. "Thanks so much," said Gerald.
"No, it's a pleasure doing things at these great houses," Don said. "Even if they're not very quick at settling their accounts." He looked round fondly. "We've got so many of them round here. Nick's tired of hearing this, but I've got two earls, one viscou
nt, one baron and two baronets on my books!"
"Quite a tally," said Gerald. "We'll have to see if we can find you a duke."
"Of course, the fabulous thing," said Nick, in a rush of shame, "is the quality of the furniture in all these houses. Things that have been there for centuries."
"Quite so . . ." Gerald nodded, as if he took that point very seriously himself. He raised and lowered his eyebrows, in perplexity at his empty glass.
Don said, "Nick tells me you have some lovely pieces at your London house."
"Oh . . ."
"A fair bit of French work, I believe?"
"Quite a bit of French work, yes," said Gerald, who didn't have a clue where most of it came from.
"And some lovely paintings too."
Gerald gave them a look of thoughtful beneficence, just coloured with impatience, even a kind of disdain—or so it seemed to Nick, who felt for both parties, as though he were witnessing an argument with himself. "You know you really should come and see us, shouldn't they, Nick?—or come even when we're away. Come when we're in France and make yourselves at home. Have the run of the place. You could have a look at all our stuff, while you're about it, and tell us what's what."
"Well, that's immensely kind," said Don, smiling at the seduction of the idea.
"Oh, I don't think we could," said Dot, whose fear of liberties in general included even those that might be allowed to herself. "I mean, it's awfully nice of you, of course . . ." She looked crushed by the offer, and bit her cheek as she peered at Don. Nick thought his mother sometimes obtuse and narrow-minded, he deplored her sillinesses, and at the same time he was so attuned to her moods, to the currents of implication between a mother and an only child, that he could trace the lines of her anxiety without effort. To come to Kensington Park Gardens, to stay in the house and rootle hesitantly around in it, would satisfy a curiosity; but it would also give unforgettable shape and detail to the world in which Nick lived, with its tolerance and its expenditure, its wine cellars and its housekeepers who hardly spoke English, and the Home Secretary ringing up just like that, which Nick said sometimes happened. It would be a flood of knowledge, and in general, as she said, she would rather not know anything more.
"Give it some thought, anyway," said Gerald; and Nick knew, as his parents murmured and glowed, that it would never be mentioned again.
He drove into the Market Square and slowed down as they approached CLOCKS D. N. GUEST ANTIQUES: "There's our shop!"—he raised an arm, as if showing him the Doge's Palace or some other great thing he was about to visit.
"Absolutely!" said Gerald. Nick could only glance at it, but it had a presence for him, like a surprise he had prepared for someone else who could never feel it as keenly as he did himself. That side of the square was in shadow now, though the sun still glared on the other side, on the white stucco front of the Crown Hotel. A cloudless sky above the roofs, the shops all shut, emptiness of a country town on a high summer evening; not quite empty, as weekenders strolled before dinner, peering into the locked shops, with a look of hoping to get the best from the place, and some lads, or "louts," roamed about under the arches of the market hall. The market hall was the jewel of the town, a cage of glass and stone on a high arcade, still locally claimed, against all the evidence, as a work of Sir Christopher Wren. It had been the pride of Nick's childhood, he had done a project about it at school with measured plans and elevations, at the age of twelve it had ranked with the Taj Mahal and the Parliament Building in Ottawa in his private architectural heaven. The moment of accepting that it was not by Wren had been as bleak and exciting as puberty. Now he revved round it, the lads looked up, and he savoured the triumph of coming home in a throaty little runaround. It was as though the achievements of sex and equities and titles and drugs blew out in a long scarf behind him. No, it was real superiority, it was almost lonely, a world of pleasures and privileges these boys couldn't imagine, and thus beyond their envy. He pulled up in front of the Crown and Gerald sprang out, pushing a hand through his hair, torn between his sporty show-off self and a hint of compromised dignity, even of some worse anomaly in being seen in such a car with a young gay man. Penny was waiting, with her blush and her tight smile, her obedient strictness, and he went gratefully towards her. "Have fun!" said Nick, and roared off half round the square again, thinking just how much he would like to do so himself.
He pulled into a parking space in the middle, where the market was on a Thursday, and turned off the engine. He would have to go home in a minute for dinner, and a cautious post-mortem on Gerald's visit. There would be a sense, at dinner, of new avenues of worry opened up . . . the suspicion, now Gerald had gone, that they didn't quite trust him: for all their nerves and good manners they had a sharp ear for bombast, they were more sensitive than they admitted; they would have noticed that Gerald asked them nothing at all about themselves; and they would think about Nick's London life from now on with a degree or two less of reassurance. His eyes ran over the shop again, which looked very shut, empty but purposeful, everything shadowy beyond the chairs in the window. It seemed freshly strange to have his family name there on a shopfront, he felt his schoolboy pride and his Oxford snobbery pinch on it from both directions, on his very own name, N. GUEST, plumb in the middle. He watched a group of boys passing slowly behind him, and moved his head to follow them in the mirror, where they seemed to prance and linger in a tinted distance. There was the clatter of a kicked can, a belch that echoed across the square. He thought, what if he'd stayed here, so far from the essentials of Heaven, the Opera, Ronnie's deliveries. . . ? For a moment he laboured in the fiction of that alternative life—there were cultured people here, of course, with books and gramophones: when he tried to picture them they all took the form of his teachers at Barwick Grammar, Mr Leverton and his Hopkins group. There were one or two school friends he could probably count on. Statistically there ought to be five or six hundred homos in Barwick, hidden away, more or less, behind these shopfronts and unreadable upper windows. The Gents in Abbots' Field would become a wearisome magnet, an awful symbol.
Across the road, half-dazzled by the evening sun, couples were arriving at the Crown for the dinner, the women in long skirts, their hair done, the men in suits, greeting each other with little pats and after-yous, confusing attempts at social kissing (not between the men, of course), all of them excited to be hearing their MP later on, but calm too with the sense of accumulated lightness in being Conservatives. And fuck, there was Gary Carter, setting out on the scent of his own Saturday night, in a short denim jacket and stiffly tight new jeans and that terrible sexy haircut; he called across to a mate under the market hall, he showed himself off to him somehow, with the funny unchallengeable poofiness of a handsome straight boy in a country town. Though girls apparently loved boys' bums too—good judgement, though Nick wasn't sure what they wanted with them. Gary passed under the market hall and out the other side, and started to amble back along the pavement behind. It was time to go; Nick sensed the atmosphere of Linnells waiting, in all its stolid innocence of what it was taking him away from. Then he shook himself, shocked to be dragged under and back by these small-town dreams. One way or another the place had to be left; he felt his long adolescence, its boredom and lust and its aesthetic ecstasies, laid up in amber in the sun-thickened light of the evening square; how he always loved the place, and how he used to yearn for London across the imagined miles of wheat fields, piggeries, and industrial sidings. He thought he would just cruise out past Gary and stir his interest and fix a picture of him in his mind for later. He started the car, and craning round to reverse into the road he saw the folder with Gerald's speech in it lying on the back seat.
Penny was sure to have another copy for him, in the hotel, though probably one without these inked-in jokes, underlinings and reminders: the text was revealingly marked up for so confident a speaker. The names "Archie" and "Veronica" were ringed in red at the top of the first sheet. The thing to do was to find Penny and insinuate
the speech back into Gerald's hands. Drinks would be under way now, and Nick pictured already one of the grimly decorous "suites," used for low-grade business conferences and Rotary dinnen, where the function would be taking place. He was only wearing crumpled linen trousers and a short-sleeved shirt, but he could dart in like a stagehand with a forgotten prop, he could be functionally invisible, and for the Barwick Conservatives disbelief could remain suspended.
In the crowded front hall he was still the driver, the messenger, and if any of the guests recognized him, members of the Operatic, men who had filled his teeth and fitted him for school blazers, they didn't show it. If it was a snub it was also a relief. He asked at reception, and the girl thought Gerald had gone out to the car park at the rear—she thought he wanted some air. Nick sidled out and went into the long corridor which turned and stepped up and stepped down through various awkward annexes towards the back of the building. Here hunting prints and old Speed maps of the county were hung against red-flock wallpaper; and the carpet was red, with an oppressive black swirl, like monstrous paisley. Couples came towards him, half-smiling, crisply reassuring each other about the locked car, the tidied hair, the tablets patted in a pocket. They seemed satisfied by this passageway, the sketchy historical sham of it, the beer smells and cooked lamb smells in the spaces between fire doors. And there was Gerald, at the next corner, glancing to left and right as if planning an escape, a last quick minute of his real life before the show started—Nick didn't shout out because of the people in between, but he saw him push open a door at the side and pop in.
The sign said "Staff Only," so that Nick looked round too—it was probably a back way through to the Fairfax Suite. Inside there was a service passage, less glaringly lit, and he saw Gerald's head through the small wired window in another swing door—and Penny's too, giggling: that was good, it meant things were under control. The door was still settling back in lazy wafts which was why perhaps the noise of Nick pushing it open didn't alert them—it was just a further rhythmic displacement of the stale air. He managed to make a kerfuffle, half turning back, trapping his leg and dropping the folder so that neither of them would know he had seen Penny's hand, like an amorous teenager's, tucked in the back pocket of Gerald's trousers.